Getting a good job

At 80+ you still get to go home. It gets hard when 130+ is required for more than a few weeks in a row. My personal record is 152 work hours (yes, conscious and working, not sleeping or eating) in a single week. I hope to never have to find out whether I'm too old to break it. If you aren't sleeping in bubble wrap under a desk with a guy holding a machine gun walking the halls, you haven't had a long day. :) But, of course, academia is easy. I can only think of one project I've worked on that had flexible deadlines. Of course that was very much to its detriment. When you're late for a delivery required to support a launch, your project and your thesis go away. You deliver an instrument, or you deliver an inert model with equivalent mass and vibrational properties. Guess which one you build first. Industry doesn't have a monopoly on sink or swim. Could be a selection effect. Maybe we get the cream of the crop in PhDs here. Maybe we require them to be more the ubergeek than is usual. I see no contradiction in that, those bright enough to sucessfully complete a PhD and be sucessful in industry would have likely succeeded without one. I might answer the same way if I didn't think mine had gotten me anything. Question: Half of the 30 people present had PhDs, what fraction of your new hires do? Another one: Do those 15+ PhDs on the staff think their primary skill is making a simple project last two years? Eric